


Read to Me

by kissing2cousins



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Guns, Insomnia, Other, Sherlock Holmes and Experiments, bullet analysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 02:36:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17377985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissing2cousins/pseuds/kissing2cousins
Summary: John awakes to the sounds of gunfire in the flat, rising only to find that Sherlock is at it again with more of his experiments. Ignoring the detective and his insomnia-driven need to constantly keep working, John tries to focus on his latest blog entry. As he tries to write, there is a part of his mind that is busy analyzing his flat mate's insomnia and how it is connected to the failure to solve their most recent case. To his surprise, Sherlock asks him for a strange favour that is so intriguing John finds it hard to refuse.





	Read to Me

ADF

As the sun rose, peaking in and out of the hazy sky, a swath of its warm glow made its way through the heavy dark green drapes that framed the east window of the Baker Street flat.  This swath gradually moved across the tidy bed inside the uppermost bedroom, crawling towards the plain wooden headboard of the midcentury frame.  Along its path, it traversed the still body within the blankets, over the rhythmic movements of the man’s slumber, until it reached the turn of a slightly stubbled jaw. The day-old bristles, which were so light in colour they were almost invisible in normal lighting, glowed as the warm, bright sunlight hit them.

The soft snores of the man faded into a silent irregular pattern as the light drew ever upward from jaw to cheek, and slowly to brow.  The closed eyelids twitched, crinkling to block the invasion.  The body of the man shifted, turning over in the bed to ignore the unwanted intruder. There was loud snuffle before lapsing back into a soft rhythmic pattern once more, content with a few more peaceful moments of sleep.

But alas, it was not meant to be.

The body of the man was jolted to full alertness by a pair of repeating blasts. Blam-blam! Blam-blam! Blam-blam! Each successor was as cacophonous and as shocking as the first. Sleep was no longer a concern, as the soldier’s military training brought him out of his slumber and fully awake like a jolt of electricity reanimating dead tissues. His body spasmed upwards, the blankets tossed away in a tidal wave of polyester, as the man attempted to maneuver his limbs from the comforts of the bed. His arms were free of the tangle, and he twisted at the waist to throw his legs out of bed, but free they were not. His top half, still propelled by his lurching momentum, was thrown off kilter and the man tumbled off the bed in a gangly flurry of limbs, eyes white with surprise. His backside hit the floorboards, quickly followed by his back, making a loud thum-thump that made the meagre furniture in the room rattle. His knee was left cocked at an awkward angle, his ankle still bound in the twisted cotton sheets.

The soldier muttered an expletive under his breath and lay there placidly trying to catch his groggy brain up on his current predicament. His muscles ached in protest, along with a new extremely annoying throb that pounded behind his eyes. Both were a result of the raucous commotion from the parlour below. The man cursed his luck, cursed his flat mate, and then lay there a few moments longer.

The quiet was not settled for long. Soon the air was rent again by another two blasts. Blam-blam! Blam-blam!

Now fully awake the soldier could more readily recognize the concussive sound. His immediate thought was ‘gunfire,’ most likely from his own gun. Yet, the crack of the bullets had been deadened and strangely resonate. The detective—of course, it was the detective, it was always the detective—was not adding more holes to the already pockmarked walls of their parlour. No, he was up to something else—which worried the soldier even more.

With a grunt of effort, John tilted his head back, spying the nightstand by the bed. He was close enough that he could reach a hand back over his head to grab the single drawer’s knob. He struggled from below and backwards to open it. After it had slid open far enough, he fumbled around inside, finding nothing but a nearly empty bottle of painkillers and the discrete sized bottle of personal lubricant. The illegal Sig Sauer P226R, which normally rested there or in the belt of his jeans, was missing.

As John came to terms with the realization that his sociopathic flat mate had infiltrated his bedroom and nicked his handgun, he also came to the startling conclusion that the second set of gunfire had sounded slightly different than the first. This meant that Sherlock had a second firearm unknow to the soldier. The latter fact of that duo spiked his anxiety enough to get the man moving again.

John yanked on his captured leg. This rash technique only served to ensnare him further. He sighed in annoyance and forced his torso upwards, balancing on the upper half of his back end to reach the sheets that formed his cotton bonds. Once his leg was free, he climbed to his feet and headed straight for the door.

It was evident now that his flat mate had indeed been in his room while he slept, for he found the door slightly ajar. John made a habit of sleeping with doors closed and it was not a habit he broke easily. He tsked the other man’s prattish disregard for personal space or belongings and stepped through the threshold, conjuring his rebukes. The air outside the bedroom was slightly cooler than that of the bedroom, the sun’s light had already heated the interior despite the thick drapes. His skin lit with gooseflesh and John became suddenly aware that he was naked.

He normally slept in a cotton tee and pants, but he had forgone any such preparation upon his return last night. It had been dreadfully late, and the dogged chase around the dark and sweaty crevices of the criminal underworld within the old city had left him without a care for the state of his person. His clothes had been damp and had smelled of all sorts of unsavoury back alley aromas, so he had undressed and left the clothes in an unkempt heap in the corner, sliding between the sheets as he was.

This was by no means how he felt at the moment, however, and he did an about-face, heading back through the door into the bedroom. It was midsummer in London now and based on the light filtering through the crack in the drapes, it was already well into the morning. The city had been hit by a week of unseasonably hot weather that left the air humid and sour. As if adding insult to injury, the night refrained from bringing any kind of cool relief. John hoped today would be different, seeing as his skin had already felt some cool relief, but he was not about to hold his breath.

He pulled a pair of jeans from the hamper of clean clothes he had not yet had time to put away properly and then a sleeveless tee. With both on, he marched down the stairs of the flat. John found the detective’s experiment in the kitchen and soon all his suspicions were realized. Sherlock had not only his Sig but also three other handguns, all of which were perfectly illegal to possess. He had them lined up on the kitchen table, laid out in order from largest to smallest on a black hand towel. Beside them was an open laptop with a large professional microphone and a scattering of other tools. Rulers, pens, pencils, an expensive looking digital camera, and a calculator were all crowded around a yellow notepad, which was filled with a hastily scribbled table and notes in the detective’s unruly cursive. This all, however, was dwarfed by a large rectangular metal box that took up the majority of the table’s surface. At one end of the box was a shaft of some sort that looked as though it fed inside.

The detective was strangely absent from the intriguing scene and, with no one to rebuke, the soldier’s curiosity took charge. He came into the kitchen, making a loop first around the table and its large mysterious occupant. It served to answer a few questions. He leaned over the laptop and the assortment of firearms to peer down the circular shaft. The inside of the box was dark and smelled slightly of gun powder. It was also vaguely humid.

John reached out a hand and tapped his first three fingers in succession against its metal side. The box gave a melodic tap-tap-tap back, the sound deep and echoing.

“Water.” John surmised, recognizing his answer.

It was a homemade water chamber, a ballistics firing range for bullet comparisons. This was what forensics used to compare the identifying bullet markings from gun barrels—or at least a smaller hastily built version of one. John had no doubt that it served its purpose. Sherlock did not skimp on research when it came to his weird little experiments.

However, what made him even more curious as to where the detective had gotten to, was the fact that his experiment had nothing to do with their current case. The trail of the culprits who had stolen an illegally housed mammoth skull from a wealthy private collector, no doubt to sell it to a proper museum, had gone cold the night before. This infuriated the detective. When he was vexed like this the irritable man would rant and rave and even give out the odd curse—under his breath—and then usually settle down on the couch or roost in his chair, speckled with nicotine patches.

This instead was Sherlock deflecting his frustration and disappointment with a simpler distraction. Another experiment to satisfy his constant need for exhausting his endless brain power.

But where was the man? John could see that Sherlock had been up—probably had not slept yet, he corrected—by the dismal looking cup of tea that had long ago cooled. He glanced towards the bathroom, heard the suspected flush of the toilet, and then heard a door open and close. Sherlock was in his room now.

John wondered if the genius would return to his work, as he absently cleared the table of cold teacups. He tidied up, awaiting the man’s return. He used the loo himself, freshened up, ate some marmite on toast, and brewed his own cuppa.

Still, there was no sign of the other man. John pondered then if perhaps the detective had tried to nod off—it happened so rarely that the doctor was surprised. Although unusual, the sleep was needed, and so John set to his own tasks for the day.

The man took his mug to his work desk in the parlour. This place too needed some tidying, after the rampant pace they had started out with yesterday on their current unsolved, case. He straightened the papers, bothering only to sort them into two piles: the current case and everything else. With this clutter pushed aside he retrieved his laptop from under the long couch—where he had ditched it the other day to keep up with the consulting detective, who suddenly had gasped knowingly and then darted out the door.

He took the computer and left the charge cable, too lazy to reach behind the long leather couch to unplug it. He set himself up at the desk with the computer, notes from their previous case, and his tea, finding it was indeed going to turn out to be another muggy day in London.

Before settling down to his blog writing, he closed the drapes to keep the sunlight and its heat out. If the parlour heated up there would be no point in even attempting to sleep in his room above. He flipped on the lamp on his desk and sat in his chair.

The writing was surprisingly fun for John. He had been shocked by how much he enjoyed the blogging exercise his shrink had prescribed him, once he and Sherlock had some adventures worth writing about. It was also relaxing, which was sometimes more of a draw to him. When he was writing about the cases they had, he could forget about everything else. Like that know-it-all psychiatrist had predicted, John found the writing restorative. It didn’t heal. He refused to believe that. But it certainly could make him forget for. Each adventure relived through each strike of the keys on the keyboard could replace one past ache and painful memory, drowning them one by one in a deep bottomless well somewhere at the back of his conscious psyche.

This fact was both accepted and helpful. It was part of what drove his arse to the chair and his fingers to the keyboard. The fanatical readers, who seemed now to visit daily in their droves, were also encouraging. The writing was helpful even before them, but its power had increased ten-fold with the attention his blog garnered now. Plus, as an added bonus, the affections of his readers served to irritate the gorgeous self-righteous prat of a consulting detective. One of the few ways that the doctor could get back at the cock and his illegal experiments and pretentious attitude towards social norms and authority.

His fingers were working in tune with the marching story he laid out for his readers, sentence by sentence, with a languid fluidity. He marvelled at how the quiet of the usually raucous flat aided in his progression. He thanked his lucky stars, perhaps a little too soon.

Blam-blam! The stillness of the flat was suddenly run through, as gracefully as an axe through a log.

The soldier cried out, “Bloody hell!” as his instincts propelled his arse straight up and out of the chair. The impressive reflex was so fast and so violent that said seat was thrust backwards into the leather chair Sherlock favoured as a roost. The table rocked, spilling his half-full tea. Brown liquid spattered his notes, soaking the corner of the stack, turning the pages into a soggy-bound mess. John tried his best to contain the carnage, pushing his laptop safely back, cursing as he did so.

The detective paid him no mind, filling the air with another blam before John could cuff the damn yellow ear protectors from his curl mussed head. “Bugger off, will ya?!” he snarled, as he marched past the lout to toss a damp lot of brown notes into the sink.

“I’m in the middle of something, so no, I won’t be buggering off,” Sherlock growled indignantly in return, bending down to retrieve the large yellow foam ear pads from the floor where John had knocked them.

John sighed, resignedly, knowing full well he could do little to assuage the madman and his plans. He never could before, and he was pretty sure that hadn’t ever changed. Knowing this, he rinsed his tea sodden hands, dried them, and then turned back to Sherlock in a placating manner. “Look, it’s the middle of the day,” he started.

He must have hesitated a moment too long, for his flat mate eagerly cut him off. “The time of day is of no consequence, John.”

The soldier scowled at the lanky genius and the quick dismissal of his concerns. This actually seemed to work. The detective’s brows came together with a comical look of bewilderment—not for John’s worries, but in confusion over what exactly he had said or done that warranted the scolding stare. John logged this reaction away to use later—his own ongoing experiments into the workings of this odd man he lived with bearing fruit—and shook a finger at the genius, reminding the man, “Lestrade will be pissed if he has to send someone to the flat to check on reports of ongoing gunfire.”

Sherlock groaned, shaking his head and throwing his arms petulantly up into the air. He slapped them back down against the tops of his thighs like an exasperated tween, as he blustered, “Good gracious, no! Not that!”

They exchanged disapproving scowls this time, eyebrows lowered over narrowed eyes, teeth clenched, and jaws tight. Sherlock got bored first—probably never won a staring contest as a child—and gave an exaggerated roll of his piercing eyes. “Lestrade should thank me! His men could use a good running now and then.”

“That’s not exactly the point I was trying to make,” John said simply, folding his arms across his chest, as he leaned his arse back against the sink. “You scared the piss outta’ me.”

In defiance, the detective grabbed one of the other guns and shot down into the shaft. He turned back to his flat mate, eager to gauge his response. John glowered at the prat.

Sherlock turned his body slightly away, glancing back at John askance. There was a coy smirk to his mouth that dimpled his cheek, as he proudly replied, “Got your blood pumping, did it?”

John was angry—it was a rude twisting of the facts and pissed on his PTSD—but was gutturally true. It had got his blood pumping, and the two of them had already established that John liked it. So, even though the tosser was a cock, the soldier laughed. He didn’t really mean to. He had tried to scowl again, but the chuckle bubbled up and out heedless of what he thought. John had to cover his mouth and nose to stifle it, so as not to encourage the genius. He wiped at his face and tried to regroup. The attempt failed miserably.

Sherlock turned back and offered the gun to his flat mate. John raised his hands again, excusing himself, “Oh no. Lestrade can come here and arrest you all he wants, but I’m not going to spend my evening down at the Yard. It will be hot as hell down there, and I have a date.” He enunciated the ‘t’ on the last word. He wasn’t sure why.

The detective’s smirk flipped upside down—only for a second. Then his mouth became more of a pout, which John hated immensely—the man’s lips threw him off his equilibrium. Sherlock stepped closer, gun still proffered, “Lestrade is too lazy, and besides, I have a permit.”

“To shoot illegal handguns inside the flat?” John scoffed, with another stifled chuckle to punctuate how incredulous he thought the statement was. “I doubt that.”

Sherlock smirked again, and there was that hint of a dimple that was even more disarming than his pout. “Well, if the need arises for one, Mycroft owes me a favour.”

“That’s even harder to believe,” John sarcastically snorted but took the gun anyway.

This wasn’t John’s gun, but still, the Glock 17 was comfortable in his grip. The part of his brain that fought to join this foray wanted desperately to know where the mad genius had come up with the pistol but the other half, which wanted very much to feel the Glock’s kick against his palm, dismissed this as being trivial. Sherlock moved aside and offered John his spot. The soldier felt the twisting of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, as he raised the muzzle of the pistol to the shaft and felt his finger steady on the trigger.

A thought struck him, and he lowered the gun. “Where is Mrs. Hudson?” he asked, clueing into the absence of the older woman, like a child wondering why they hadn’t been caught yet, before joining in.

Sherlock’s crooked grin told him everything. “She’s out with the baker.” He stated, pleased to announce this anytime he could since having embarrassed her with the deduction weeks ago. He just couldn’t let the joke die.

“Tesco’s then?” John interpreted, just to deflate the other man.

“She needed more biscuits.” The detective replied, truthfully, with a nod of his head to acknowledge and berate his flat mate’s deduction.

“Because you ate them all. Bloody hell, I’m getting better at this!” John laughed, his chest swelling as he congratulated himself.

“It’s not my fault she keeps them in the pantry so close to the door.” Sherlock retaliated, waspishly. “Just shoot the Glock. I can use your shots to rule out user-bias.”

Blam-blam! The Glock kicked in his hand, and John relished the feel of it. The two went through firing the guns into the water several more times, bantering and tittering like two kids who had constructed firecrackers out of a chemistry set.

When they had finished, John excused himself, wanting to return to his unfinished blog entry. He had a couple more hours to add some girth to the adventure before he would have to jump in the shower. He left Sherlock to collect and examine his bullets from the chamber experiment, returning to his laptop.

The chair was still knocked over at the desk. As John righted it the laptop rebooted from its sleep mode and the doctor in him began to calculate the known hours of sleep that he could justifiably say Sherlock had gotten within the last week. By the time that his fingers were set at the keyboard again, John had concluded that the number was extremely low.

He glanced back at the detective, wondering how the man could physically and mentally operate at his astounding level in the conditions he operated under. The genius did not show signs of fatigue beyond the slight purple hue under his eyes and the rumpled appearance of his hair and clothes.

Curious now, John called inquiringly to the man hunched over his microscope, “When was the last time that you slept?”

There was a long lull of silence, punctuated only by the switching of bullets that did not even require a bob of his head away from the eyepiece, before Sherlock questioned, “What is your qualifying basis for ‘sleep’?”

“Sleeping.” John reiterated with emphasis on the verb. He folded his arms over his chest, leaning the chair back onto two legs as he elaborated, “Let’s say, for clinical purposes, more than two hours at a time.”

There was another break between the conversation, where the man’s fingers alternated between twisting and turning the bullets beneath the lens of the microscope and jotting notes in his quick jot-note form that was a language of its own. John was on the verge of feeling like he was perhaps being ignored, when the brunet’s voice simply stated, “Tuesday. Midafternoon.”

“That was five days ago.” John balked incredulously, stupefied by the staggering amount of time.

Sherlock’s head cocked to the side, his ruffled curls springing with the sharpness of the movement, as he scrunched the bridge of his nose in thought, and queried, “Wait. What’s the date?”

John made an undignified snort of disbelief, before he answered the ignorant man, “It’s the 22.”

“Ah,” the genius’ nose straightened along with his spine, as he affirmed with confidence, “Then it was last Tuesday.”

The whites of John’s eyes showed brightly as the front legs of his chair snapped back to the hardwood floor. The idea was unfathomable. The doctor’s mind was cluttered with the medical data that flooded in, as he failed to calculate how the madman managed it. Still boggled by the prospect, all John could manage to caution his friend was a lame, “You should sleep more.”

The dark head was dipped back to the eyepiece, the fine fingered hands diligently working again, as the detective volleyed back, “Sleep is for the weak.”

“No,” John defended emphatically, thrusting his chin forward with doctoral imperialism, as he rebuked the immature ignorance, “sleep is human. You’re not a machine.”

“And yet I do believe I’ve been referred to as such on several occasions,” Sherlock responded, his words weighted with bitterness, as he accused, “by you.”

“You’ve been called worse.” John deflected with a smirk, as he considered all of the slights he had endured at the rash bluntness of the man’s own tongue. Pointedly, he added, “and you deserved it.” The doctor hesitated a moment, hoping the burn would sink through the man’s scaly exterior, before he enforced, “Still…last Tuesday? Have you been surviving this entire time on cat-naps and caffeine? Didn’t you sleep when you were in your room this morning?”

There was another long lag in the discussion. John waited as Sherlock scrawled in his notebook, eventually going back to his keyboard. An answer finally came, minutes later. “I tried,” the detective succinctly confirmed, “but it didn’t work.”

That last statement made the doctor paused in his typing, as his brain considered this viable possibility that he had never entertained. The ever-moving brain theory was gaining traction. He glanced studiously at his flat mate, whose attention was still consumed by his task. Sherlock’s unwavering dedication to his focus reminded the blogger of his own project.

John pushed the detective’s sleep deprivation from his mind, returning to the methodical tap-tap of his fingers against his keyboard. It took him longer than he would have liked to pick up where he had left off—where the crack of the gunfire had scared the piss out of him, he corrected—and when he did, the pace was slow and laborious. A far cry from the flow that he had wielded prior when the parlour had been his own.

Stubbornly he travailed, plugging away with his first two fingers of each hand, silently cursing his inability to find a way to incorporate the rest of his digits in his typing process. Plodding along, he soon was nearing completion, when movement in his periphery drew his attention away.

The brunet rose from the table and began pacing back and forth before the fireplace, behind the blogger. John knew that gate, the exaggeration to his steps, the set of his pace—the man was frustrated. Distracted, John wondered what the cause was, given that the water chamber test seemed particularly simple when the doctor realized it may not be frustration after all. His medical instincts took over, silently assessing the patient, observing what at first glance might seem normal, but was ultimately something much deeper.

Sherlock was having trouble concentrating, his attention span had tightened, his muscles were slow and weak, sore and aching; the fatigue was getting the better of him. It was overpowering his distraction techniques, messing up his back up plans. The man needed to sleep.

John voiced as much, out of concern as much as triumph, but the detective just sneered and brushed off his diagnosis, swatting his hand through the air at the doctor as though it may provide some physical defence against what had been properly prescribed. The exhausted genius flopped bonelessly down into the over-sized leather chair, sliding down until his head rested on the low cushion. His long, lanky legs stretched out in front of him, his backside barely on the seat. His dress shirt was wrinkled, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the collar was undone. Even his curls were unruly, frazzled out of their normal model-perfection by fidgety finger combing. His eyes were glassy, the white scleras pink in the corners.

Their gazes met, and John suddenly realized he had been staring. He swivelled his head back to his laptop, feeling his cheeks warm uncomfortably. It took a hell of a lot longer to figure out where he had left off with his blog than it had the last time, as he tried to ignore his own physical response to the detective behind him.

A quiet voice interrupted his awkward focus. It wasn’t quite a question, and it certainly wasn’t a plea. It was a meek sound that just wasn’t—surely couldn’t—be his flat mate. “Read to me.”

John glanced back, and there was no mistaking who the comment belonged to. The genius’ hand was up, and those long fingers were massaging the bridge of his nose.

“What?” the blogger clarified, his voice thick with cynicism, “My blog?”

“Sure…” slurred the quiet voice, now impatient and slicked with a thin annoyance, as his eyes closed, and his massaging fingertips moved to his right temple, “Yes. Your blog. That will do.”

The burgeoning writer had been flattered by the request and then just as quickly insulted. John pushed his feelings aside, as he acknowledged that he had been struggling through this last paragraph and reading the thing aloud would certainly allow for a new perspective. “Ugh, right.” The nervous blogger stumbled, scrolling to the top of the document. He didn’t dare look back again at the detective, as he moistened his lips, preparing to start.

John could not recall the last time he had read aloud. It made him feel childish and insecure, vulnerable in a way he was unaccustomed to. He reasoned with himself that it was ridiculous to recant now and for such preposterous reasons. Thousands of people had read his blog now. Sherlock had even read them—where he felt he was being terribly maligned and misrepresented.

Remembering how irate the prat had been, spurred John’s motivation. Not his confidence. No, he still felt exposed reading aloud to the detective, but to exact even a small morsel of revenge was enough to risk it.

He cleared his throat and began to read what he had finished of ‘The Geek Interpreter.’

_‘Three young men came to Baker St claiming that events in recent issues of a comic had started happening in real life. I know. We'd turned away mysterious deaths and worldwide conspiracies, but this was the one that Sherlock was interested in…’*_

John paused a moment, scrolling down as he moistened his lips again. Sherlock was quiet behind him, so he continued.

_‘Sherlock said that there were three possibilities - one was that KRATIDES actually existed. A possibility I actually think he was taking seriously. The second was that Chris was suffering from some kind of psychological delusions. The third possibility was that this was all being done for his benefit…’*_

A soft sound made the blogger pause in his reading. It was soft and rhythmic, lulling at a slow and even pace. John twisted his torso to glance back around at his audience, only to be met with the sting of disappointment.

The detective’s dark head rested on the back of the low cushion of the large chair, the previous tension melted from his slack features, his eyes peacefully closed. His hands were folded neatly over his chest, which rose and fell with the steady inhales and exhales of his breathing. He breathed in through his nose, and upon exhalation, the breath was pushed through his full lips, making an odd rumble that was faint and most certainly could not be categorized as a snore. The sod had fallen asleep!

The blogger cursed to himself and shut the file on the laptop. He had not even gotten halfway through the document, and there was still more to add. That didn’t matter now. The blogger left his flat mate to sleep in the chair, mentally logging the time, before he slipped into the shower to get ready for his date.

The detective was still asleep, curled up in the seat of the chair when John came down from dressing. Surprised by the fact, he took pity on the man. Before leaving, he grabbed the plaid throw off the back of his chair and draped it over the slumbering form.

***

Coming in from the rain, John shook himself off and slicked back his wet hair, annoyed that his date had gone so miserably and that trusting the weather report had left him drenched by the sudden downpour. He tromped up the steps to the flat, his sodden loafers squishing uncomfortably, leaving wet prints behind on the worn wooden treds.

The flat was dark as he entered. He shed his sopping coat and shoes before he went through to the kitchen and flicked on the glaring lights. He snagged a beer from beside a stack of oddly coloured Petri dishes, eager for the solace of the alcohols soothing flavour filling his mouth. He drank heavily of the dark brew, finishing half the can in one go, before giving a loud sigh of satisfaction.  He paced from the kitchen into the parlour, turning on the lights above the fireplace, as he considered whether his current mood would be bettered or worsened by another row with his unfinished blog entry.

Warm light flooded the room with a soft ambient glow, illuminating the half-crumpled form of the genius still dozing, cockeyed in the leather chair. The blanket had fallen partially off, half of it covering the detective’s waist and thighs, as the other end puddled on the floor at his feet. The only movement was the measured lift of his chest. Now that his face was half turned into the leather cushion the soft not-quite-a-snore had turned into a hilarious snuffle.

John felt the quirked lift at the corner of his mouth as he took in this visage of the man, exposed in a way that the doctor had yet to experience. The mad genius was almost vulnerable like this. Most certainly adorable, now that his prickly demeanour and scathing forthrightness was turned off by the basic human necessity of recharging.

The doctor checked the time. Grabbing a journal from his cluttered desk, he made note of the sleep period for further analysis and comparison before he gently roused his flat mate.

Sherlock gave a disgruntled snort of protest, twisting away in the chair, as he argued a muffled, “I’m still listening, John.”

The smirk on his mouth grew, as he shook the man from his somnolence, explaining with a gentle directness that he was to move to his bed. The detective reached out a groping hand, which John took, helping the man to his feet. Together they made it to the bedroom, where Sherlock was unceremoniously deposited onto the mattress. His body curled protectively into the fetal position, as John reefed back the covers from underneath the fully clothed man. Protectively, the doctor covered his patient, leaving him to catch up on his lost sleep while his brain remained shut off.  

The rhythmic breathing returned the instant his dark head hit the pillow and John was left with that same feeling he had felt as he watched Sherlock slumber in the chair. The man was damn annoying…and in the same stretch, undeniably adorable—when he wasn’t running his mouth and ignorantly ignoring all social cues and customs. Almost likeable.

Fin

_Please note that the blog entry in this fanfic is taken directly from the BBC  John Watson blog website found at the web address provided below:_

_*Dr. John H. Watson-_ _http://www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk/blog/16june_  
  


 


End file.
